1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to lawn mowers. More particularly, this invention relates to a manual powered lawn mower; i.e., a lawn mower without a motor, which provides the performance of a motor powered lawn mower.
2. State of the Art
Lawn mowers of many types have long been known in the arts. A common old style of lawn mower is the reel-type blade with its multiple cutting bars, such as seen in U.S. Pat. No. 437,808 to Batcheller. Because the reel-type blade mower has multiple curved blades, it is expensive to manufacture and sharpen. In addition, the reel-type blade mower only performs adequately when the grass which it is cutting is very short, because a fan action of the multiple rotating blades creates a wind force that actually pushes longer grasses flat before the blades reach them for cutting.
While less common in the old style lawn mowers, rotary blade mowers, which are common today as motor powered lawn mowers, were also well known to the arts. Examples of early manual rotary blade type mowers are seen in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,931 to Boone, 270,090 to Martin, 498,533 to Clousing, and 703,513 to Adams and Hough. Common to the manual rotary blade type mowers is that a bevel gear is used to translate the power provided by the wheels of the mower so that rotation of the blade can be around an axis perpendicular to an axis around which the wheels rotate.
With the advent of inexpensive, compact motors, the motor powered lawn mower substantially displaced the market for manual powered lawn mowers. Not only are the motor powered lawn mowers easier to handle, but the cut provided with a high speed rotary blade is typically superior to that available with manual powered mowers. Thus, while occasional manual powered mowers have recently been designed, such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,341,058 to Chun which provides a bicycle/mower for exercise purposes, for the most part, the advances in the art have been in motor powered mowers. However, due to environmental concerns relating to gas powered mowers, laws have recently been enacted in various jurisdictions which favor manual powered mowers.